A homeowner with a dead furnace or a leaking heater no longer has to scroll ten links. They ask an assistant who to call and get a short list. Tekton works to put your company on it, then checks the assistants every month to see where you land.
In one line: answer engine optimization (AEO) makes your plumbing, HVAC, electrical or roofing company easy for ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude and Perplexity to read and quote by name. Tekton tests the assistants on a fixed set of real homeowner questions so you can see where you stand.
A recommendation is assembled from your Google Business Profile and your website, along with your reviews and the directories and supplier locators that list you. We clean up each one, and we work with whatever job software you run, including Jobber, Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan.
An assistant answers in one breath. "Who should I call for a furnace that will not start in Brantford?" returns two or three company names with a line about each, and sometimes a phone number. The homeowner never opens a results page. When your company is missing from that short list, the call goes to one of the names that made it.
That shift is most visible in urgent work. Emergency plumbing and no-heat calls and storm-damage roofing are decided in minutes, and the person asking wants one answer fast.
Assistants pull from sources they can read and trust, and for a home service company that list is short and fixable.
Primary category, the full list of services, service areas, hours and emergency availability. A profile that says "Plumber" and nothing else gives an assistant very little to quote.
A plain page for furnace repair, panel upgrades, drain cleaning or flat roof repair, with the towns you cover and what a visit involves. Assistants quote pages that answer the question directly.
Your name plus your phone number and service area stated identically on your site, your profile, directories, and the dealer or installer locators for the brands you carry.
Schema markup on service pages, and settings that let the assistants' crawlers reach the pages that matter. We also publish an llms.txt file, a small extra that we include.
Assistants read what customers write. A review that mentions a tankless install in Burlington carries more information than "great service."
We run a fixed set of real homeowner questions across ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude and Perplexity, record who is named, and repeat it on the same dates so you see a trend across months.
The questions fall into two groups, and each needs a different fix.
The second group is where most trades companies have nothing written. We draft those pages with you from your real quotes and your real crews, with honest ranges and the factors that move the number. No invented figures, and nothing an estimator would have to walk back at the door.
We start with a baseline. Using your trade and your towns, we write a fixed set of real homeowner questions, run them across ChatGPT, Google AI, Claude and Perplexity, and record who is named and why. The free Blueprint includes this for your business.
Then we fix what the assistants read. In the first weeks that means the Google Business Profile, service pages, listings and crawler access. After that we draft the first few question pages from your real quotes and jobs, and you approve each one. From then on the same prompts run on the same dates every month, so you see movement over time and can connect it to calls.
AEO is one track in the Growth seat, next to local SEO, the website, reviews and booking. It shares most of its foundation with local SEO, so you pay once for the shared clean-up. The build is a one-time investment, then the monthly seat. See the packages page for how it is structured.
This is our founding-client guarantee. The monthly seat is waived until the engine produces the agreed number of new tracked enquiries (tracked calls and booking-form requests from the channels we build) within 90 days of go-live. Paid ads are excluded, and you answer or return the calls that come in. The build is paid and yours either way. We never promise rankings or bookings or revenue. For background, read AEO vs SEO for a local business.
Most of the foundation is shared, so good local SEO helps. AEO adds answer-shaped pages for the "should I" questions and a check of what the assistants say, which ranking reports do not show.
No. Assistants change their answers, and no one controls them. We improve what they read and measure your mention rate on a fixed prompt set.
Yes. Most trades are service-area businesses. We define the towns you serve on your profile and on each service page so the assistants know where you work.
You get the dated prompt results and the count of tracked calls and booking-form fills. Mentions matter because they lead to calls you can count.
The free Growth Engine Blueprint includes an AI-search readiness report: how often the assistants name you and your nearest competitors on real homeowner questions, and what to fix first.
Your free Growth Engine Blueprint is four research reports and a 12-month roadmap covering your local search visibility, your AI-search readiness, your website and booking health, and your reputation. When it looks like a fit, Dan walks it through with you in a 75-minute session. No obligation. See how engagements are structured on the packages page.